“More oilfish, I’ll bet,” he called to her. “Look out for bubbles over the side.”
The hunt for the shoals did a good job of distracting her. Ten minutes later, Montagnon shot her nets and dropped to a sedate trawling speed. They were in business. Coral Star’s crew came up on deck and Bernie had to move back to the wheelhouse.
Cole flashed her on the radio. He didn’t travel well. “Can I throw up now, please, Momma?”
“Try to miss the fish,” Bernie said.
There was still no sign of trouble. There hadn’t been any signs that Levanto was heading into danger, either, but the trawlers were inside the MEZ and that meant they had the comfort of a Raven patrol with a working sonar buoy, and CNV Falconer doing the rounds. This was as safe as it got in a job that was risky at the best of times.
At least Gullie was good company for a man who really did know far too much about fish.
“You any good at salting fish?” he asked her.
“Not two tonnes of it.”
“I think it’s going to be more like twenty. I can feel it in my water.”
He probably could. When Coral Star drew her nets an hour later, Bernie went outside to see how good his guess was. A straining net emerged on the end of the cables as the winch whined, a bulging ball of glittering scales and draining foam.
For once, no gulls hovered around shrieking and trying to grab their share. They’d shifted their attention to the other trawlers.
Odd. Really odd.
“See?” Gullie said. “Chock full.”
“The birds don’t seem impressed.”
“Ingrates.”
The catch was mostly small, iridescent oilfish. Bernie wasn’t squeamish about killing what she ate, but watching the squirming mass of fish, eels, and slimy things she didn’t even have a name for suddenly made her feel sick. They were struggling to breathe, suffocating in air, flapping around in their death throes. When she killed an animal, she made sure it was fast. It was the only decent thing to do. Marcus watched, frowning, but that was no guide to what he was thinking.
“You okay, Bernie?” Marcus asked.
“I’ll have the beef today,” she said, turning to the rail to look away at the horizon. There wasn’t a lot of room to avoid the bloodless carnage. “Really well done.”
It was just as well Dom wasn’t standing next to her. She’d showed him how to wring a chicken’s neck when he’d been in her survival class during commando training. God, he was a kid then. Seventeen. The poor little sod had looked at that chicken with such horror that she’d been sure he’d pass out. He carried that big fuck-off commando knife that he didn’t think twice about using in combat, but there he was feeling guilty about a chicken. He did it, though, and he ate it. He did it because he had to.
Poor old Dom. We never know what’s going to be one step too far for us. We balk at the damndest things.
Maybe Hoffman’s memory of Anvil Gate was something small but unerasable like the damn chicken, a substitute for something far darker.
He’ll tell me. Got to be patient.
Bernie wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening behind her. She could hear the trawler crew chatting, and the wet slapping noises as they sorted the catch into different buckets. Five or six hundred meters to starboard, she could see Cole leaning over the rail of Montagnon as if he was going to throw up again. Baird was scanning the sea through binoculars.
Well, back to canine patrol tomorrow …
“Hey,” said one of the fishermen, the kid they called Crabfat. “You think this is what Cole got excited about when we caught that shale eel? Remember how he told us not to touch it?”
“Shit,” Marcus said. “Shit.”
The hair on Bernie’s nape rose instantly.
“Not you as well.” Gullie laughed. “Plenty of sea life glows. It’s dark down there, and they—”
“Get clear. I said get clear.”
“God … what the hell’s that?”
Bernie swung around and saw what Marcus and Gullie were looking at. In the mound of fish, she could see a misshapen coil of scaly flesh that she would have taken for some kind of eel if it hadn’t been rippling with blue light.
It wasn’t the lights that scared the living shit out of her. It was the fact that the thing was changing shape as she watched it.
It sprouted a distorted limb, then another. Her eyes met Marcus’s for an awful second.
The gulls spotted it. They bloody well knew.
“Get off the damn boat.” Marcus grabbed Gullie by the collar and shoved him toward the stern. “All of you—get off the fucking boat—jump!” He opened the radio channel. “Dom, Baird—steer clear. We’ve trawled up a frigging Lambent.”
They were in the middle of the ocean. The only place to run was over the side. Gullie scrambled over the gunwale and his three crew didn’t even stop to argue. They dropped into the water. Bernie did what she was trained to do—she stayed put. How big was this bastard? Could they save the boat? Did it have a blast radius?
“Bernie—get out. Go on.” Marcus caught hold of one of the net lines and hitched it to the winch. “I’ll try to dump it overboard again.”
The Lambent eel was thrashing around now, shooting out tentacles and wrapping them around anything it could grab. One just missed her and whipped around one of the derrick’s stanchions.
“Yeah, I don’t think it’s going without a fight.” She revved her Lancer’s chainsaw. “Is it killable?”
“Don’t.” Marcus ducked as a tentacle lashed past his head. “They explode.”
“Shit. You’ll never dump it.”
“Just go.”
“Set the bloody throttle to full speed and jump. Sod the boat.”
Everyone came on the radio at once. The Lambent eel seemed to be growing by the second. It was thrashing so violently that it was scattering dead fish everywhere, carpeting the deck. Marcus vaulted over the tool locker and disappeared into the wheelhouse, and a few seconds later Coral Star’s engines roared into life. The boat shot forward, but trawlers weren’t built for fast getaways.
“Marcus?” He hadn’t come back out. She edged past the eel with her back to the rail, feeling her way along with both hands. “No heroics. I mean it.”
She got to the wheelhouse door just as Marcus burst out of it. He crashed into her like a thrashball player and sent them both over the port-side rail into the water. For a moment, she was floundering in the muffled green gloom, propeller noises burbling in her ears, and then something jerked her head above the water and she took a gasping breath. The explosion shook her right through to her gut.
“Shit—” Marcus said.
The last thing that crossed her mind before the sky fell on her was that the trawler wasn’t nearly as far away as she’d hoped it would be.
The column of water crashed down like a collapsing wall. She didn’t know if she went under for seconds or minutes, only that when she bobbed up again, Marcus still had a grip on her webbing. Her hand felt instinctively for her rifle. It was still on its sling. If she’d been wearing full armor and not just torso plates, she’d have gone down like a stone.
“Everyone okay?” Marcus yelled. “I said, is everyone okay?”
“We see you, baby,” Cole said. “Swinging by to pick up passengers.”
Bernie trod water, looking around for the trawler. She couldn’t see a damn thing except the bobbing heads of the trawler crew and Montagnon bearing down on her. Coral Star had vanished along with the Lambent eel.
Gullie swam over to Marcus. “Is that it? Is that a Locust?”
Marcus spat out some water. “I’ve never seen that before,” he said, “but it’s Lambent. Whatever Lambent are, the grubs were fighting them in their tunnels and losing.”
Gullie just tipped his head back, eyes shut, and floated. “And now they’re here. We were safe. The Locust couldn’t tunnel out here. But you never told us they could swim.”
“We didn’t know,” Marcus said
sourly. “Now we do.”
Bernie’s stomach kept churning. The depth of the shit they were in suddenly hit her. The Stranded were the least of their problems now, and Vectes was no longer an ocean away from the horror of the mainland.
The nightmare had decided to follow them, except it was far worse. This was a life-form even the grubs were scared of.
“Yeah … shit,” Marcus said again, as if he’d heard her thoughts.
Montagnon came up on them and cut her engines. Bernie grabbed the scrambling net and got halfway up to the gunwale, but Cole had to reach over and haul her the rest of the way by her belt. She flopped onto the deck at Baird’s feet.
“Well, that fits my theory,” he said cheerfully. Bernie decided she’d kick the shit out of him when she stopped shaking. “Harvest hauls up a glowie in the nets, they try to shoot it, it blows up—mystery solved. Same for Levanto.”
“I’m so happy for you, Professor. Really.”
Baird held out his hand to pull her to her feet. “Could it sink a warship, though?”
Gullie, wringing wet and white with shock, stared at the position in the water where his livelihood had vanished in a ball of smoke and flame. “How big do those things get?”
Marcus took out his earpiece and shook the water from it.
“Brumak size,” he said. “At least. The size of a tank.”
It was the last time anyone was going trawling for a long while.
CHAPTER 7
All civilian vessels are confined to inland waterways and five hundred meters from the shoreline until further notice.
Martial law is now in place under the terms of the COG Fortification Act.
All residents must observe a curfew between the hours of 2000 and 0530 unless the subject of a farming exemption.
(By order of the office of
Chairman Richard Prescott)
PELRUAN-NEW JACINTO ROAD.
“I want this kept quiet,” Prescott said. “I want to know what we’re dealing with before we start panicking the civilian population.”
Hoffman pressed the mute button on the radio mike and was glad he was halfway to Pelruan, unable to grab the Chairman and shake the shit out of him. Where the hell did Prescott think he was? He couldn’t even keep the lid on everything back in Jacinto, where he had every line of communication buttoned down and every citizen wholly dependent on the COG for protection, food, and information. Vectes was a much looser, more free-range animal, impossible to rein in. The news was already out. Hoffman was on his way to Pelruan to do his hearts-and-minds act.
Anya’s knuckles were white as she gripped the steering wheel. “Count to ten, sir,” she whispered.
Ten. That was counting enough. Hoffman released the mute key.
“We know what we’re dealing with.” Hoffman shut his eyes. “Goddamn Lambent. And there’s no keeping that a secret. The fishermen know. They saw it frag their boat. They radio home. They talk. What the hell do you want me to do—shoot them all to shut them up?”
Prescott paused. Maybe he was considering the retort as a viable option. Hoffman wouldn’t have put it past him.
“I’m giving an order to restrict and jam all nonmilitary comms channels,” he said at last. “We don’t know who or what might be out there monitoring us now.”
“Chairman, the people here live in isolated communities. They need their radio net.”
“They can relocate to New Jacinto.”
Even loyal, tolerant Anya rolled her eyes at that. Hoffman decided to pick his battles, and this wasn’t one worth fighting—yet.
“And the farmers? You want to move them in, too?”
“Every farm and settlement has at least a squad of Gears billeted there. They can make supervised use of the secure military net.”
There were a dozen reasons why that was going to make matters worse. Hoffman saved them for later. He could waste time arguing with this asshole, or just get on with his job and beg forgiveness later.
“Very well, Chairman. Hoffman out.”
The Packhorse rattled north. Anya didn’t say anything for a while, but Hoffman could see she was fretting.
“Do you think he realizes how much we depend on locals calling in incidents when they’re out working?” she asked.
“No. Does he know how many radios we can support on the military net?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good. I get the feeling we’ll have a lot.” Hell, nobody in Pelruan would be communicating with Stranded. It was hard enough to get them to mix with the Jacinto population. He’d give them free access to the COG’s channels. “No point pissing off these people any more than we have to. If we stop them talking to each other, they’ll just take to the roads, or bypass us in ways we might not know about.”
Anya smiled. “Good thinking, sir.”
“I don’t disobey orders often.”
“Ah, you’re not disobeying now. I distinctly heard him say, ’supervised use of the secure military net.’ Control routes all, hears all. I think that qualifies as supervision.”
“What is it with you CIC kids? Mathieson’s turned into a politician, and now you.”
“I was thinking,” Anya said, “that I was a frontline Gear now.”
“So you are.”
“I’m fit enough to resume patrols, sir.”
“I need you on civilian liaison right now.”
“Don’t you think you should put Sergeant Mataki on that for a while? She understands rural people. They respect her.” Anya paused. “And she’s been blown up twice in one week. She’s not sixteen anymore.”
In all the years Hoffman had known Anya, she’d never said a word out of line or argued about anything. She never griped, sulked, or criticized. A quiet rebuke from her felt like a hard kick in the ass.
“I know,” he said at last. Pelruan was now visible in the distance, a neatly maintained little fishing town still living in an age the mainland had forgotten a whole war ago. “I know what I ought to do. And you know how she’ll react.”
“If it were me, sir, I’d stop her.”
Even in the privacy of this vehicle, she didn’t spell it out to him. But Hoffman could read a whole extra layer of meaning in there. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t let her end up like Margaret. If only he’d stopped his wife from storming off in the run-up to the Hammer strike, she’d have survived. He didn’t. Margaret was incinerated with all the other millions of unlucky bastards. Anya had spent the final hours before the launch calling around every vehicle checkpoint in Ephyra to try to find her.
Anya knew, and understood.
“Thanks, Anya,” he said. “Good advice.”
Lewis Gavriel was already waiting outside the town’s assembly building when Anya brought the Packhorse to a halt. He was with Will Berenz—his deputy—and a group of about fifty people. Drew Rossi, the sergeant responsible for the town’s Gears detachment, walked forward to intercept Hoffman as he got out of the vehicle.
“Sir, is it true?” he asked. “Is it Lambent?”
“Damn well is, Drew.”
“Shit.”
“How are they taking it?”
“You have to spend fifteen years with grubs for neighbors to grasp it. I don’t think they understand at all.”
“I’m not sure I do, either, Sergeant. Okay, let me talk to them.”
Hoffman was going to level with them whether Prescott liked it or not. There was no reason not to.
“Have you heard from your boats?” he asked, knowing they almost certainly had. “Everyone survived this time. But you can’t go out fishing now.”
Gavriel looked shell-shocked. They all did.
“Is it true?”
“What, that your trawlers were blown up by Lambent? Yes. It is.”
“They’re Locust, then. You know how to deal with them.”
“Lewis, I have no goddamn idea what they are, only what they do. Nobody knows the first thing about them. Except the grubs were at war with them underground,
and we never knew until we sank Jacinto.”
It was a hell of a lot for anyone to take in, let alone people who’d been cut off from the rest of Sera since the Hammer strike. Hoffman could see the complete bewilderment on their faces. They couldn’t even manage to be angry. They looked like scared kids waiting for Dad to tell them he’d make everything okay again.
Berenz broke the stunned silence. “I never thought I’d say this, but I wish it had been the Stranded.”
“So do I,” Hoffman said. “Because they’re killable. Last Lambent we killed—well, we think it was Lambent—took a Hammer of Dawn laser to finish it. That’s what sank Jacinto.”
“Oh God …”
“No bullshit, people. Every time we see one, it’s a different shape or size. And don’t ask me why they detonate. I know as much as you do. If it wasn’t for some of the Gears running into them under Jacinto, we’d know even less.”
“Why have they come here?” Gavriel asked. “Or are they everywhere, and we just happened to be unlucky?”
“If I knew that,” Hoffman said, “I’d have a better plan, but I don’t. Not yet.” He looked into their eyes and suddenly felt like an utter bastard. This was an old COG outpost, and these folks had grown up thinking the COG was invincible. The last few months had proved to them what a delusion that was. “But the best I can do is this. Any of you want to take refuge in New Jacinto—I’ll make damn sure there’s room for you. If you want to stay here, I’ll ship in more Gears. And if you need me to do any damn thing at all, you call me direct. Got it? Lieutenant Stroud will make sure of it.”
Anya had her arms folded, feet apart. She didn’t stand like the old Anya now, no casual hand on hip. She stood like a Gear. Damn it, she stood like her mother.
“There’s nothing to suggest they’ll come in close to shore,” she said. “They’ve all been trawled up as far as we can tell. So as long as you don’t put to sea, you’ll be okay.”
“But fish is a big part of the food supply here,” said one of the women. “Our farms are keeping you fed down south. How are we going to make up the shortfall?”
Gears of War: Anvil Gate Page 14
